Are you starting to think about applying for your first lectureship in history? Submitting applications and never hearing back? The Academic Job Boot Camp is a free half-day event for early career historians sponsored by History UK, History Lab Plus and the Institute of Historical Research. It will help you to structure your academic CV, hone your cover letter, rehearse your job presentation and undergo a mock interview, as well as demystifying some of the processes around academic recruitment. The experience, feedback and advice you receive at the event is designed to improve your chances the next time you apply for an academic job.

How will the boot camp work? Participants will take part in a simulation of all stages of the job application process up to and including being interviewed as a shortlisted candidate. Twenty-five applicants will be invited to be interviewed at a half-day boot camp on 14 May 2016 at the Institute of Historical Research in London. There they will be interviewed by pairs of experienced academics drawn from a dozen universities nationwide. They will also deliver job presentations to other early career historians. All participants will receive feedback on their interview and presentation and will have the opportunity to observe how others fare. The event will end with a roundtable on how to make your job application succeed, after which there will be drinks, a free dinner and networking opportunities at a nearby pub and restaurant.

13:30-16:00 Job presentations (10 minutes each in front of other early career historians who provide written feedback: Wolfson II and Pollard Seminar Room N301)

16:00-17:00 Roundtable on Myths and Truths about Applying and Interviewing for Academic Jobs (Wolfson II)

17.00-19.30 Pub then dinner at a nearby restaurant

This event is free and sponsored by History UK, History Lab Plus and the Institute of Historical Research. All early career historians are encouraged to apply, with preference being given to those who have completed their PhDs.

History Lab Plus is pleased to be sponsoring a lunchtime session at the Social History Society 40th Anniversary Conference in Lancaster this week. We are glad to have Emma Brennan (Manchester University Press) and Emily Russell (Palgrave) talking to us about publishing and we anticipate lots of questions!

You can find us on the programme for Monday 21st March (Day One), 1.15-2pm in CCA016.

Our incoming co-chair Kelly Spring will also be there to answer any questions you have about joining History Lab Plus and what we do. Do come and say hello!

Dr Victoria Stiles graduated from the University of Nottingham in the summer of 2015. Her research focuses on representations of Britain and British imperialism in books which were in circulation in Nazi Germany. She blogs at tattyjackets.blogspot.com

“So what do you do?” he asked, choosing the worst conversation partner out of hundreds. I was stumped, partly because I thought that question had gone the way of gentleman’s suspenders but more because my usual answers no longer applied. I’d been a student, teacher or both for thirteen years. This hadn’t been what I did so much as what I was; cut me and I bleed a mixture of red ink and tea. At that point though I couldn’t honestly say that I was either of those things and so the answer I offered this well-meaning person was “mostly panic”.

I passed my viva nearly a year ago. I had expected a thorough grilling, a disembowelment and dismemberment of my ideas worthy of Game of Thrones, followed by months of working to get things just right. Instead, I was suddenly done. I was (jokingly?) told to crack on with publishing so that people could get annoyed about my findings. Clutching my celebratory whisky, I felt like I was being chivvied out of the trenches to face the heavy artillery of real academia. After all, this was what I’d been training for. My brain’s response: “wibble”.

It turns out that all of my coping strategies are calibrated to manage the panic attacks and migraines which I’ve had, on and off, since my mid-teens. I’ve trained myself how to disengage when I’ve taken on too much and to focus on easier, routine tasks when the brain gremlins begin to riot. For me, teaching is a diet of mundanity and mayhem on which I can thrive, offering regular small victories – mine and the students’ – to give me a reason to get out of bed. I thought that these strategies would continue to work for me, not realising that they aren’t designed for dealing with unemployment and the sudden loss of a long-term project. I fell apart.

It made no sense to me. I’d passed, got the title, and worn the floppy hat. I’d “won” – didn’t that feel fantastic? Wasn’t I relieved that it was all over? Mustn’t it be wonderful to have all of these opportunities open to me?

Numbness and wretchedness. What the hell was wrong with me?

Days and weeks and months of putting together applications to no avail. Months of joking that I’ve gone from trainee academic to unemployed person who swears they’re working on a book. Months of feeling dead inside for days at a time or panicking at the idea of reworking my thesis (the particularly grim subject matter doesn’t help). Then September rolled around, I still didn’t have an academic post and I felt like that was it, I’d missed the window. I was never going to be an academic.

Except… please bear with me here because I’m a cultural historian and I’m compelled to deconstruct, like a puppy chewing the furniture. What I’ve done this year is much of what I’d want from academia but deconstructed (and frequently unpaid).

Running a science communication event, which is nothing to do with “what I do”. Picture courtesy of gmss.uk

I’ve completed a major piece of research and received positive responses. I’ve marked exam scripts (two-week contract). I’ve taught, supervised and offered pastoral care to students (twelve-week contract, pre-sessional English tutoring). I’ve delivered lectures (in pubs, as a volunteer speaker). I’ve invigilated exams (two short contracts) and acted as consultant to a museum (self-employed with a one part-time client). As a volunteer I’ve been involved in some fantastic events and discussed big ideas with lovely, interesting people. I’ve attended local research seminars, tried to keep reading and attempted to stay in touch with other researchers despite feeling like an outsider and a failure.

For the moment then, what I “do” is whatever comes along. What I “am” is a researcher and educator as always. What I’ve finally learned is that I can give myself permission to be proud of these things even though what I’ve achieved isn’t neatly tied up with a job title and a salary. I wish that somebody had warned me how much things would change and how little the previous years would prepare me for this. I wish that someone had handed me a note to that effect along with my thesis receipt. This isn’t a criticism of the graduate and postgraduate support provided by universities, but this is naturally geared more towards strategies for getting into a post rather than how to handle the potential effects of such a huge change in circumstances.

So I’m telling you now: whatever you “do” and whatever you get done, you can give yourself permission to be proud of it. You can give yourself permission to talk about how you feel and to seek help. You can give yourself permission to tell people (myself included) that their proposed solutions won’t work for you. You can change the conversation from “what do you do?” to “what are you excited about?”. You absolutely can give yourself permission to be kind to yourself.

Disclaimer: The fact that I seem to do better when I’m working should not be taken as anecdotal evidence that “being in work cures depression”. Being busy and making myself useful to people (as Jane Austen would put it) alleviates or distracts me from some of the symptoms. If you are struggling to cope at all then I urge you to be more sensible about it than I have and look up mental health / emotional wellbeing services in your area. The NHS website is a good place to start.

Dr Christopher Phillips is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, having been awarded his PhD in History by the University of Leeds in April 2015. He is in the process of preparing his thesis for publication under the title Managing Armageddon: Transportation on the Western Front, 1914-1918, and is pursuing funding opportunities for a new research project to investigate the development of railway towns in England between 1870 and 1970. Here he reflects on 2015, his first post-PhD, and the uncertainty of 2016. You can follow him on Twitter @DoctorCPhillips

The genesis of this blog was an, on reflection, somewhat bitter comment posted on Twitter in response to the History Lab Plus’ call for contributions on life as an early career researcher. It focused on the negatives which have largely dominated my professional life over the second half of 2015, and which ultimately overshadowed my experience of the year as a whole. Having been offered the chance to elaborate on the initial 140 character response, however, I realised that my knee-jerk reaction did not adequately reflect the range of experiences which I faced over the course of the year. What follows is not an attempt to right any of the perceived ‘wrongs’ of academia, or an attempt to comprehend why I find myself at the start of 2016 with only one task – the supervision of five dissertation students to completion in May – guaranteed to pay me an income for the foreseeable future. What it is, I hope, is an attempt to document what may (or may not) be a transitory period from PhD student to academic without the usual happy ending that other such discussions that I have read tend to conclude with.

2015 actually began rather well for me. I received broadly positive, constructive feedback on the full draft of my thesis which I’d submitted to my supervisors before Christmas, and news of the acceptance of a journal article (subject to a few wrangles over the title) within the first week of January. By the end of the month, a book review had also been accepted for publication in a highly respected journal in the field, and all 100,000 words of my thesis had been soft-bound and sent off to my examiners. In March I delivered a really well received seminar paper at my undergraduate university on a chapter of my thesis, was invited to speak at a public event at Leeds Industrial Museum in May, and despatched the final proofs for an article which had been finished almost two years before. In early April, two hours of viva examination resulted in the award of a PhD (subject to correcting a few spelling mistakes), and encouragement from both examiners to publish. In the same week as the Graduate Board confirmed my doctorate, I was invited to interview for a three-year research post.

And then the handbrake was applied. The interview did not lead to anything. Nor did any of the other thirty plus applications I submitted for various roles during the academic year 2014-15. I applied for permanent lectureships, three- and five-year research fellowships, teaching fellowships ranging from three months to two years, and a number of non-academic posts. I received no invitations to interview, and in many cases no response whatsoever. In no cases did I receive any feedback on my application, and on one specific occasion I remember the rejection email stating – in bold type no less – that no feedback would be given to ‘unsuccessful applicants’. I received only a handful of rejection emails, the majority of which were not even personalised but began ‘Dear applicant’. Some, of course, hurt more than others. The one for a permanent lectureship at a very prestigious institution which doubtless received a shedload of applicants was unsurprising. The one for a two-year fellowship where I’d done my PhD was utterly humiliating. Aside from not being deemed worthy of addressing by name, the rest of the content of these emails was equally discouraging, impersonal, and demotivating. There was nothing constructive upon which I could improve for future applications. Friends and former colleagues, including an incredibly supportive supervisor, could offer no further suggestions to improve my cover letters. Was my intended research deemed unimaginative and uninspiring? Was the relatively narrow band of teaching experience I gained during my thesis (not for the want of trying to gain more) what was holding me back? Was it the lack of a book contract that meant my applications were being consigned to the ‘no’ pile? I have no idea.

I have tried to rectify all of these, but without success. After four months of no contact whatsoever, my first choice of publisher for my ‘book of the thesis’ finally got in touch to essentially say ‘you should have proposed an entirely different book’. A second never responded to the proposal at all. I am currently awaiting the result of the latest attempt. Throughout the summer I emailed my CV to various Heads of Department to enquire about the availability of sessional teaching, without success (although, to my eternal gratitude, every single department I contacted in this matter responded quickly). The last attempt to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship with the research proposal I had developed during the final year of my PhD foundered when the academic I had contacted at a potential host simply stopped responding to my emails two weeks before the deadline.

In the middle of September, I got a job. Two weeks before the start of term I was offered the chance to teach a survey course on British History from the Roman Conquest to the Industrial Revolution, and to supervise a number of dissertations. Halfway through the term, I took over the delivery of another module – this time on US civil rights. I did not get this work through any application process, but as a result of being in the right place at the right time, and thanks to the recommendation of a former colleague who had originally been approached to do the job. Although the majority of that contract is now finished, I have been put on a database of potential teachers for another university (again at the recommendation of a former colleague) which may lead to some more teaching experience in the upcoming semester to add to my CV. I’ve also created a new potential research project which I have received encouraging feedback on prior to submission for funding through the Leverhulme Trust. Whether any of this work will lead to anything or not who knows. I am under no illusions as to the competitiveness of such schemes, but perhaps if unsuccessful on that avenue it will intrigue someone on a hiring committee for a job yet to be advertised for next year. Perhaps the extra teaching I have undertaken this term outside my area of expertise will shift me from one pile of applications to the other. Perhaps a publisher will take a chance on my thesis and offer me the chance to write the book, and that will be enough evidence to convince someone, somewhere, to offer me an interview.

In the meantime, I keep searching jobs.ac.uk and H-Net, and working on preparations for a two-day conference I am part of the organising committee for. The book is on the back burner, not least because the necessary research trips to London are too expensive, and the new research project is still in the process of conducting literature searches and scanning through what secondary material I can lay my hands on. What state either project will be in come 1 January 2017 is impossible to say right now.

Our co-chair Cath Feely shares her reflection, such as it is, on 2015. You can read Cath’s post on 2014 here. This will most likely be the last time she does this because she’s all reflected out.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t really want to write this post. There are too many things that I should be doing right now, all vying for my attention and making me anxious: marking, module handbooks, planning for next semester, sorting out the admin backlog for History Lab Plus that has been neglected over a very busy semester, and so on.

But it was more than that. It was that, before I actually sat down to write, I couldn’t think of anything that I’d really achieved in 2015, my second year in a permanent lectureship. I didn’t have a story to tell about it. Nothing momentous happened. It was neither a particularly good or bad year for me. It just was.

When I started to write, however, lots of things came to mind. But I realised that what had made me most proud in 2015 weren’t ‘my’ successes. I was there, sure; I might deserve some of the credit. But they are not things that are easily itemised in a review of the year: dissertations that absolutely blew my socks off (you know who you are!), conversations with colleagues, touching and personal messages from graduating students and the like. They were all, all of them, the result of a group effort. And I realise now just how grateful and proud I am to be part of that group.

So I did do good stuff in 2015. But I did not do it alone. And the credit for any success is shared with my colleagues and our students.

That’s not to say that I don’t have personal goals for 2016, ‘the year of the book’. Now that I have done some leg work in setting up new modules, I want to write more regularly. There are plans – realistic ones, I think, too – afoot.

But I want to step back from some things too. Mostly, I want to step back from getting angry. There is a place for anger but, back in early September when the so-called ‘early career debate’ was raging on Twitter, I took some time out and drank a milkshake in a Derby café and, stupidly, fought back tears. I had taken so much of what was being said about the betrayal of early career historians by people with permanent jobs far too personally and it had tired me out. I wondered whether anyone at all cared about what we had been doing with History Lab Plus. I thought about how much, personally, I was giving and whether it was doing any good. A day or two later, I received an email from someone telling me how much difference one of our events had made to her. And that was my answer. But I also realised that it was possible to care about these issues without feeling responsible for them. I can help, yes, but I am not alone in this endeavour. I’d like to thank another anonymous scholar who, in a hotel bar, told me that it was not up to me to fix academia single-handedly. This was said with the greatest respect and I have taken it to heart, in a good way.

So there’s no advice in this post. No story. Except that it’s okay to have an okay year.

A year ago, we published a series of reflections from early-career historians at various stages of their post-PhD lives. You can read them here. George Campbell Gosling kicked us off last year and he’s kindly allowed us to cross-post his account of 2015, one in which he felt his ‘split academic personality came of age’. Over the next few weeks, we hope to add to these reflections not just with updates from those who wrote last year, but with new voices. If you’d like to contribute, please tweet @cathfeely or email me at c.feely[at]derby.ac.uk. Over to George (again!):

Looking back on 2015, it’s been a mix of bedding in and big changes. But the changes haven’t always been the ones I might have expected.

At the end of the year, my work life looks in some ways very similar to it did at the beginning. I’m still in the same department, even if I’ve moved up the corridor into a shared office. I’m still working on the same book, now putting the finishing pre-publication touches to the manuscript that was still coming together a year ago. Blogging about history and the teaching of it is still one of my favourite pastimes, even though I’ve started on a new research project and I’m not doing any teaching.

Yet this academic year feels very different from the last, and I guess that’s inevitable. For one thing, the second year in any institution – even if in a different position – is less stressful. You know the people and the place, the oddities and the opportunities. It’s why my only real regret from my 4+ years now of post-PhD academic life is all the moving around and uncertainty. Without it I wouldn’t have met some wonderful people and taken on some interesting and unexpected jobs, but I’d also have fewer grey hairs.

Swapping full-time teaching for full-time research is also bound to be different. Worries about how much of a student’s grammar to correct replaced with trying (and failing) to remember receipts while on archive visits around the country. The constant stimulation of mastering new topics each week with the chance to immerse myself in one (set of) thing(s). Piles of marking are out and taking minutes of team meetings is in.

But I also feel very differently about myself as an academic. A year ago I was enjoying being a jobbing history teacher. Now I feel like an historian. My appointment as a postdoctoral research fellow and the warm (yet helpfully constructive) backing of anonymous peer reviewers for publishing my first book – they both feel like more of a vindication than passing my viva. I earned the right to call myself Dr then, now I feel like I have the opportunity to put that into practice.

Put it another way – I feel like an expert now. Of course, that old friend Imposter Syndrome makes regular appearances, but through the ups and downs I do feel more confident professionally. It’s been a decade since my nan asked me why there was no NHS when she was a child. And I’ve spent the years in between thinking about the answer – even while distracted by the job hunt and trying to repeatedly refashion everything I had to say on the topic, in keeping with the latest imagined future employment opportunity. By now I know this stuff. I am an expert.

I also think I’m seen more as an expert, but often not for my research. An odd split has emerged. I feel like an expert for what I’ve been given a chance now to do full-time: researching and writing history. But I also think I appear and am seen as an expert for something else: my blogging.

I sometimes blog about my research. When I do the audience is usually many of the same people who would read a fuller academic publication, especially if I used the blog to let them know about it. Sometimes that’s the audience I want to reach and that’s fine. But the audience this past year for my blogging about teaching and studying history has been far, far larger.

None of this is based on a greater knowledge or understanding than most history tutors, but the way it’s presented seems to be useful. This is probably because I’m useless at learning by intuition or imitation. The fact I need to analyse and learn thoroughly myself means I’m well-equipped perhaps to relay this to others. My brain works differently from most and I’ve turned that to my advantage.

By the end of 2015, over one-third of universities in the UK have now directed people to my blog from their institutional websites. The traffic from my own Warwick Uni is rivalled by Huddersfield and both Leeds and Leeds Beckett, outdone by Hertfordshire and Kent and, out in front, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. When I meet people for the first time in my academic life, it’s by far the most common thing they know about me. For most people who come across me, my expertise lies in blogging study skills advice to university students.

There have been a lot of changes in 2015 and there’s been lots of bedding in. But I think I’ll look back on this, above all else, as the year my split academic personality came of age.

In a rather heated moment during the recent early career ‘twitterstorm’, History Lab Plus offered to host any responses to Matthew Lyons’ original piece that were constructive and sought to move the debate on. We were pleased, as historians, to see that William Whyte, a historian of universities, answered calls for a historical perspective on the debate. His response is below. We continue to be open to any constructive responses from all. E-mail us at historylabplus@gmail.com to contribute.

Historians need to be careful when they extrapolate from their own experience. History may be a broad and catholic discipline, but at its heart is surely a basic attempt to historicize: to relate past and present; to situate individual experience within broader, historical categories and trends.

In his article for History Today, Matthew Lyons raises an important issue, articulating some complaints of the early career researchers he has encountered, and (though he does not acknowledge it) also echoing many other voices within universities who are similarly concerned about the conditions in which temporary staff of all sorts currently have to work.
But in order to make his argument, he falls back on a fundamentally presentist, ahistorical – indeed anti-historical – peddling of myths. Like so many people writing about universities, he wholly ignores history and instead invents an idealized past – a past, which of course, never existed.

He’s far from alone in this. ‘Nostalgia is a big thing in academia’, observed Diana Warwick, head of the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals in 1996; ‘everything is worse today’. And it’s true that even those who ought to know better are prey to the myth of the golden age – indeed, when the London Review of Books turned its attention to life within Britain’s universities in December 2011, it found a variety of laments and a range of dates identified as better than now, from Keith Thomas’ celebration of the mid-1950s as a ‘golden age of academic freedom’, to Rachel Malik’s description of the mid-1990s as a ‘wonderful’ time to work in academia. In the last ten years or so, a variety of different writers have favourably compared every post-war decade with the experience of life in the twenty-first century university.

If the past is always golden, the present is always dark. Hence the language of decline, of betrayal, and crisis. In his lecture to the Australian Historical Association on 7 July, Peter Mandler challenged the notion of a broader ‘crisis’ in the humanities, pointing out that ‘It is hard to take too seriously talk of a crisis in Britain when even by the narrowest definition of the humanities the absolute number of humanities students has increased fivefold since 1967, and by the broader definition almost 10-fold’. One might do the same for Matthew Lyons’s notion of a ‘great betrayal’ of early career researchers now.

Of course, for all those individuals trapped in nine-month contracts (or worse); for those who have a PhD but no job – and seemingly little likelihood of getting one, this will seem like a crisis. As Harold Wilson is said to have observed, for the individual unemployment is 100 per cent. If anyone was ever lured into postgraduate work by the promise that they would find it easy to become a tenured member of a university, then they are quite right to feel betrayed. We mustn’t, too, make the equivalent mistake of arguing that everything is fine now, and that there is nothing to complain about. That is isn’t true, either. The work of History Lab Plus illustrates just how much more universities ought to be doing for their temporary staff.

Nonetheless, it is worth challenging the notion that there was time in which post-graduate funding was easy to obtain and permanent jobs were just there for the taking. The Robbins Report of 1963 noted that each year only 300 state-funded scholarships were available for the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the whole of the UK. In the 1980s, there were only 200 funded places for PhDs in sociology and just a few more for history.
Nor were jobs easy to obtain. Far from being, in Matthew Lyons’s words, ‘a generation which benefited from free education to degree level and generous support into postgraduate study’, the most senior staff at most universities today were amongst the very few people who managed to gain employment in the far darker days of the 1980s. Public expenditure cuts after 1981 led to the loss of about 5,600 academic jobs and creation of very few new posts. Even the Thatcher government realized that this was creating a demographic crisis in which a generation of postgraduate students would be lost forever, and in 1983 the ‘New blood scheme’ was created to hire some of the very best. It is an index of just how little this benefitted the humanities that in its three years of operation, only 66 posts were created for the arts and 78 for the social sciences. An over-privileged generation, this was not.

In that sense, our current problems are not the product of cuts, or decline, much less betrayal. They are rather the consequence of success. The number of universities, university teachers and researchers, and the number of postgraduate students has simply grown and grown. Moreover, in recent years, a rise in university income, driven by tuition fees and by increasing research funding, has enabled institutions to employ a growing – not a declining – proportion of permanent staff. By 2000, one survey estimated that half of all academics were on temporary contracts; in 2010, HEFCE produced figures suggesting that nearly 90 per cent were now in permanent employment. Moreover, about half of these people would previously have held at least one temporary job.

It is this remarkable growth that causes us so many dilemmas. Last year no fewer than 539,000 people were enrolled as postgraduate students, compared to 135,000 in 1994 and around 10,000 thirty years before that. It is quite clear that, even were universities to continue to expand, there is no way in which all of these people can expect be employed as full-time, tenured academics. It would be quite wrong for anyone to promise any one of these people that their path to a university job would be smooth or easy.

But therein lies our difficulty. Twenty or thirty years ago, most of these people would not have been able to undertake postgraduate research. Many of the institutions they attend had no history department and no tradition of taking research students at all. If the problem is the overproduction of PhDs, then which are the institutions who should be stopped from training doctoral students? Who are the individuals who should be prevented from starting research? Or do we just have to accept that there is a structural imbalance and that most doctoral students will not go on academic work?

It is a valid debate, but not an easy one. And it’s not one that will be helped by bad history or accusations of bad faith.

N.B. This guest post was sent to us by an ECR who wanted to contribute to the debate but was unsure about doing it in their own name. We are happy to publish responses, whether anonymous or otherwise.

This post is about the ECR issues that have been convulsing Twitter. It is a story of personal experience, and as such it does not contribute very sensible calls for systematic evidence-based debate. But I do think that stories of personal experience have a place in this discussion, not as an alternative to the wider trends we need to identify, but in terms of addressing how individuals are dealing with these problems, and what range of solutions might be available.

I have some ideas, all of which stem from my identity and experience, but perhaps that identity and experience is worth thinking about. I hope my colleagues can understand that I have chosen to write this anonymously, even though it is a deeply personal post.

Let me begin, then, by saying that I do not deal well with uncertainty. No need to paint a picture, but I book travel a long time in advance, arrive everywhere early, and like routine. I am a lousy gambler.

Now put this character sketch into a situation: the situation of the early-career researcher. When I was finishing my doctorate, I started applying somewhat haphazardly for junior fellowship positions at Oxford and Cambridge. In the end, I got a six-month research fellowship, and spent most of it applying for the next round of things: more postdocs, the same junior fellowships, but also teaching positions both temporary and permanent, the British Academy. I put out feelers about the Leverhulme, the Wellcome Trust, the AHRC.

I managed to pick up some teaching to carry me through another year. And I started applying again.

This was the worst time for me. The same schemes where I had had limited success before (interviews, personalized rejections) were now rejecting me outright.
Did I mention that I do not deal well with uncertainty?

Around February, things started to look up. A Cambridge college wanted to interview me for a three-year fellowship, and – to my surprise – another university wanted to interview me for a permanent lectureship.

Long story short: I got the permanent job, a year after I finished my doctorate.

You could call this lucky, but it isn’t.

I know what you’re thinking, but I can get this out of the way pretty quickly: the obvious alternative to ‘luck’ in my story is not ‘hard work’.

Hard work is not optional on the lower rungs of the academic ladder.

I have known many different people from a variety of institutions and backgrounds, and ALL of them, without fail, and despite what they sometimes seem to worry, work very hard indeed.

I suspect that very few people who don’t work hard make it to graduate study and then to the end of the doctorate. (I do not mean to insult anyone who does not finish: there are many, many reasons not to complete a doctorate, and I doubt problems applying enough effort is a particularly common one (quite the opposite!).)

All I mean to say is that the problem – as I see it – is not that ‘luck’ is more important than ‘hard work’ in the current system.

So, you could call my story lucky, but it isn’t.

It is privileged.

I am privileged to have held positions and had income in the months after my doctorate, I am privileged to have worked with excellent people at prestigious institutions, and I’m not under any illusion that my journey has been tough compared to that of many others.

I freely admit it: I have had a privileged education (Oxbridge most of the way) and the support (including financial) of my family throughout. I have not had extensive responsibilities caring for family members or raising children. I have never felt discriminated against because of the colour of my skin or because of my sexual preference, gender identity, or a physical or mental disability.

My story is the story of one good-enough-person among a great many whose success – I like to think! – did require talent and determination, but also actively relied on these privileges in many complex and important ways.

I am not saying this to boast. Far from it – hence the anonymity.

There is nothing to be proud of about the fact that the system I was born into, and the place I have gradually taken in it rewards individuals not simply on merit, as we sometimes like to believe, but a complex cultural-symbolic maelstrom of identity issues.

If I’m not saying it to brag, then why bother?

Because a lot of relatively junior people I know who are in relatively secure jobs in academia seem to feel (like me) that the recent spats triggered by Matthew Lyon’s piece for History Today are not helping the discussion, but instead alienating people who should be involved.

So I did not, by any means, have the toughest transition from doctorate to relatively secure employment, but there was still transition, there was uncertainty, and I did personally deal with some of the problems that are at the heart of these arguments.
And as someone who does now have relative job security I am still deeply concerned by these problems.

I think there are structural problems with the current system, which cannot be reduced to ‘too many PhDs, not enough jobs’. The oversupply of excellent ECR is a catalyst that allows institutions and the system as a whole to exploit junior academics and perpetuate unfair disadvantages, but I do not believe that oversupply justifies exploitation and injustice.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Some people really do believe that. It’s a tenet of the neoliberal attitude, which believes the ECR situation should be ‘corrected’ when students realize that academia is not an economically attractive career.
Bullshit.

The problems of precariousness and the role of privilege in this system should be corrected by sustained efforts by academics to pressure institutions for specific concrete changes that make academic careers fairer: by which I mean accessible to people from a range of backgrounds, accessible to people with different responsibilities as carers and parents, with different needs and requirements.

How? These are my suggestions. The value of speaking from personal experience is that I – like others – can explore the things that have helped me as I went through the harder times.

My guiding idea is that some of the privileges I have had from financial support and from prestigious institutions should be expectations.

ECR should reasonably expect they will get support of various kinds: this should not be a privilege limited to people who come from the right place and fit a certain image.

1 Get ‘em early

We could begin by going further back, very briefly. Everything I know from the excellent work of the Sutton Trust suggests that a deep cause of some of these inequalities lies way before university. We need a less unequal education system now more than ever, and of course, now more than ever, we have a government that is fundamentally opposed to the measures that would encourage a wider range of young people to arrive at the age of 22 or so and think academic research is a possibility, and a desirable one. Hell, we lack a government that is committed to encouraging mature students to feel that way, too.

These are debates (or despair?) for another day, because there are things we can be doing within academia to address these problems, too, even if the underlying issues of education and inequality have deeper roots…

2 The Code of Good Practice

I see it as part of my responsibility to ensure that the institution I work for meets the suggestions in the Royal Historical Society Code of Good Practice for temporary contracts, drawn up with History Lab plus, available here: http://bit.ly/1Ei6CB0
This, from the first page, a thousand, thousand times: “for those on short- term teaching contracts a few simple things, such as being included on email lists and invited to seminars, could make a big difference to their experience of a department.” The code goes on to suggest a short and straightforward list of things departments can do to make working in temporary jobs a better situation than it sometimes is now. Having an office, being included in meetings and research discussions, these should not be ‘perks’.

They should be expectations.

3 Making job applications less onerous

I would only add that – in my experience – some institutions could be more sensitive to the position that applicants are in when they apply for jobs. Is it really reasonable, in the situation we find ourselves, for every single institution in the UK to have a different hiring process? How much time is wasted producing tailored research or teaching statements for jobs at universities that never even have the courtesy to formally reject your application?

Could we have a national, standardized system (not unlike UCAS or the NHS job system)? There are obvious risks. Departments might complain that they will be swamped with even more applicants than they get at the moment and this will make their task harder.

Well, from what I can see, the problem here is not how hard it is for those of us who are looking for new colleagues. The problem is the immense pressure these potential colleagues are coming under from a variety of angles. And a standardized application system might be one way to reduce some of that pressure.

And let’s not forget that many of the same people who would have a tougher job sifting through applications in this nationwide model are the same ones who are besieged with demands for references. How would you like to write just one reference a year per candidate instead?

Of course there are other problems with this idea. Who will decide what the application should include? I suspect we would never reach any agreement on what it would look like.

And how would applicants tailor their pitch to the institution?

Well, not very much. Or rather, they would only get one shot. They’d have to pick what kind of institution in the abstract they wanted to go to, and then write a general enough pitch that those kinds of institution would be interested in them.
What else could institutions do to treat applicants better? Well I understand that personal letters to every single applicant may simply never be possible, but I will just say that every single time I got a personalized rejection, it meant a huge amount to me. Several times I asked for feedback from unsuccessful interviews and got none. I think that is broadly unacceptable. Colleagues have suggested that people worry about complaints, even court cases if they are too honest about why candidates are not good enough. I do not think this can be the main problem.

I wonder if institutions and the academics within them are very happy with a system where the criteria that exist on paper do not have to be addressed in decision-making. (I am thinking especially of Oxford and Cambridge, where the depressing spirit of academic libertarianism – both right and left wing – reigns supreme).

But let’s be clear about this: a system where departments have no accountability even to people who came very close for why they chose someone else… that is a system where privilege will continue to dominate.

4 Eliminating temporary contracts where possible

Beyond these thoughts about making life easier for people working in temporary contracts and helping job applicants, I am broadly committed to the idea that no job should be done by temporary staff that could be done by permanent staff.
Anyone who has experienced or witnessed (for instance) the misery of nine-month contracts, where staff are hardly paid to prepare teaching materials, and receive no pay at all over the summer, only to face possible renewal for another nine-months can justify the existence of temporary staff where they are not absolutely necessary. Of course temporary staff may be needed to cover periods of research leave, maternity and paternity leave, illness.

But I believe one of our goals should be to ensure that the slide of the UK system towards a US adjunct system must be arrested.
I have too many thoughts about this to contain in one post. I want to end on a positive note, although this is easier said than done.

Academia can be fantastic, and that is why so many people want to be academics. But I would hardly be the first person to point out this does not mean that any of them should have to work in financial insecurity.

Nor would I be the first to point out that the blame game turns very hurtful very quickly, not least since experiences of being ECR are clearly hugely variable.
Senior academics who feel they ARE doing their best to help junior colleagues might rightly feel pretty annoyed with recent finger-pointing. Mid-level academics with some security can quickly feel alienated from conversations because they are no longer the ones who have to deal with everyday insecurity. But as a group with BOTH 1. recent experiences (never underestimate how insulated other academics might be from what the job market is really like) and 2. a little more power within the system, surely these early-to-mid-level people must be key to making sure that change happens?

Getting angry about people who got desirable jobs without having to do X or Y blames those job-seekers (your former peers!) for systematic problems.

As the History Lab Plus Twitter account put it: ‘Let’s take the energy of this debate and channel it into working together as historians to make things better.’

So this is my declaration of hope, and also shame.

Because of course it would be easy to feel somewhat divorced from the struggle once the uncertainties are less present. My attention turns towards new uncertainties: my book, articles, the REF, research funding, teaching, the godawful Teaching Excellence Framework – to mention only my professional concerns.
I’m ashamed of that temptation and do honestly want to continue helping to reform the current situation.

And I feel bad for times I have made light of privilege in academia.

I think there is a very real problem whereby junior people are devalued in ways that make them cynical. Cynicism turns to sarcasm, and I might find myself joking about how so many jobs go to Oxbridge graduates, for instance.

It isn’t funny.

In fact, I’m ashamed of those tendencies towards cynicism in the darkest part of my between time, because, after all, I am a beneficiary of a system that is demonstrably unfair.

The only avenue for hope in the face of this shame must be: we can change this.

Here at History Lab Plus, we’re very pleased to support both the New to Teaching History event taking place at the Institute for Historical Research on 7th September and the Teaching History in Higher Education Conference, also taking place at the IHR on the 8th and 9th September. Both will be excellent events and the programme below includes some great speakers, many of whom have contributed to History Lab Plus events in the past. The New to Teaching event is free to PhDs and early-career scholars (scroll down to the link to register at the bottom of this post); there are also a limited number of conference fee bursaries for the larger conference for ECRs, but you must contact Peter D’Sena at the email address below for details. Attendance is highly recommended!

REGISTRATION FEE: £96.05 per person for both days; £53.65 if registering for only one day. For information about bursaries for students, please contact Peter D’Sena by e-mail at peterdsena@yahoo.com. For early career academics, bursaries are available – but please contact Peter first!

REGISTRATION DEADLINE FOR DELEGATES: Friday 4th September 2015

On the evening of Tuesday 8th September, there will be a meal nearby at a good quality restaurant. Information will be sent to all delegates about this as soon as we have an idea about numbers. The approximate cost will be between £40 and £50. In the past this has always been a convivial occasion and a good way to carry on networking with delegates.

In anticipation of our upcoming event on ‘Getting Grants, Getting Published and Staying Sane: Life After the PhD’, we are continuing our series of reflective posts on early-career life with a guest post from Dr Sarah Holland.

You can sign up for our very popular annual event (taking place at Senate House, London, on 21 April 2015) here.

After submitting my final bound thesis in early 2014, there was both a great sense of achievement and bubbling apprehension of ‘what next?’. I was lucky to have teaching lined up both in higher and further education, and publishing plans – but what about that illusive full time position or post doc? I knew it was a difficult time – it was no secret that for every position there are many more applicants – and during the next few months I became one of many who didn’t manage to secure the post doc position they applied for. Inevitably there were moments of doubt and uncertainty, but I never wavered from my commitment to develop a career in research and teaching – in many respects it made me all the more determined. I was going to seize all opportunities and create even more.

Reflecting on the last 12 months reminds me of how much I have done and achieved. As Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, a role I began whilst finishing my PhD, I have not only had the opportunity to teach some interesting modules to a range of undergraduate students, but also to co-design a module with my colleague, Chris Corker. Making History is an innovative enquiry led module with a small-scale research project at the heart of it. It takes students out of the classroom and into the archives and local studies library in the first year of their degree. Students also engage with public history, visiting two museums, taking part in a history walk round Sheffield and showcasing their own work at a public history exhibition. Each year, it is an incredibly proud moment to see the student’s work on public display and watch them interact with members of the public. As the module promotes student engagement and learner autonomy, it has led me to have greater involvement with research into learning and teaching – co-writing journal articles and co-presenting at conferences including RAISE (Researching, Advancing and Inspiring Student Engagement) 2014 based on the design and impact of the module.

To maximise the renewed confidence completing the PhD and successfully passing the Viva gave me, I began productively writing journal articles – two of which I have now completed ready for submission. The reciprocal relationship between town and country is the subject of a book chapter I have written for a forthcoming edited book on town and country. I am also finalising my book proposal, Contrasting Rural Communities, which adopts a micro historical approach to explore key issues in rural and agricultural history and village typology. I have also had the opportunity to present my research at a range of national and international conferences. During the summer I was in Leuven, Belgium for the Knowledge Networks Conference speaking about the role of agricultural societies in the generation and communication of knowledge. The conference itself was a fertile ground for the creation and communication of knowledge – demonstrating that as academics we are more than capable of initiating and sustaining effective knowledge networks. I also spoke on agricultural innovation at the Institute of Historical Research in London and village typology at the British Agricultural History Society (BAHS) PG & ECR conference. I have also been invited to give a full length paper at the BAHS annual Spring conference in 2015.

The summer of 2014 saw me working as a research assistant at Sheffield Hallam University, researching the role of the English farmworker in the first and second world wars on behalf of Dr Nicola Verdon. I was mainly undertaking archival research, with lucrative material including the memoirs of Land Girls, women’s land army records, prisoner of war employment records and the War Agricultural Committee records. From the perspective of my own research interests I was fascinated by the extent of regional differentiation in terms of attitudes to employing different groups of farm workers and their experiences on the land during the war.

Alongside this I continued my work as an adult education practitioner, with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and partner organisations. I developed my existing portfolio of work, which included teaching history in the community and working with mental health and special educational needs groups. As a result of this I was awarded a research fellowship that enabled me to investigate the impact of studying history on mental health and wellbeing, and explore the role of pedagogical approach and curriculum specific impact. I was also invited to join the WEA cultural studies group, and am working on developing a range of exciting new projects and resources. I have also realised the potential of social media in all spheres of my work – academia, learning and teaching in higher education, and further education. Although still relatively new to social media, it has provided new networking opportunities and I have discovered and shared ideas and interests.

Life after the PhD has undoubtedly been challenging – the initial readjustment, finding work opportunities, not to mention the danger of taking on too much – at times it has felt like I have the workload of more than one full time job, but I believe all my experiences have been invaluable – and although diverse, they have coherent ties that link them all together. I am still looking for what seems to be that illusive position but I have had an incredibly positive and productive year in so many ways. These opportunities have been all the more possible because of an incredible supporting cast, so a big thank you to everyone who has made this journey possible and all the more pleasurable – loved ones, colleagues and other inspirational people – whose eternal support and encouragement will always be treasured and remembered.